Principal Product Manager Lead

Position Overview

This role is a principal-level, hands-on product leadership position in the Product organization. It owns the end-to-end strategy, roadmap, and execution for a cross-cutting portfolio spanning AI text-to-SQL and data analysis (Aura Analyst), AI and ML functions, query optimization and tuning, and database / cloud platform observability & alerting.

A unifying theme of this role is analytics, including unlocking latent demand in our customers using AI-driven query and analysis, making the core database engine perform analytical workloads better via query optimization, and enabling us and customers to analyze system telemetry to make workloads shine. If you love analytics, you're an experienced product leader, and want to build an innovative, AI-enriched product and business, not groom the backlog, this job is for you.

A major company focus is to surround SingleStore with AI assistance to make everyone using or building on SingleStore more productive.  This includes allowing data to be queried and analyzed far more easily by a much broader range of people, and making SingleStore increasingly self-observing, self-diagnosing, and self-optimizing. This helps customers and internal teams use and analyze their data, understand workload behavior, debug issues quickly, and continuously improve performance and efficiency. This role leads product management for a range of AI analysts, skills, and MCP servers to provide these capabilities.

Role and Responsibilities

Primary product areas:

Aura Analyst

Owns Aura Analyst as the primary end-user tool for AI-guided text-to-SQL and conversational query result analysis, including technical feature set definition, customer positioning, and roadmap.

AI & ML Functions Platform

Co-owns the product strategy for AI and ML capabilities exposed as AI functions, ML functions, Python UDFs, Cloud Functions, Container Services, MCP server, and AI documentation question answering (SQrL).

Ensures these surfaces are observable, testable, and debuggable, with clear workflows for data engineers and application developers.

Aligns AI/ML function capabilities with Aura Analyst so that AI workloads are first-class citizens in observability and performance views.

Query Optimization & Tuning

Owns product strategy for query optimization, tuning, and AI-based database tuning, in close collaboration with the core engine team.

Defines how query plans, regressions, and recommendations are surfaced in the UI, APIs, and internal tools.

Partners with engine leadership on prioritization of query engine investments that materially improve customer performance, reliability, and cost.

Observability, Alerting & Internal Data Warehouse

Owns database observability, cloud containers observability, and alerting experiences used by both customers and internal SRE/support teams.

Partners with data and analytics teams on the internal product analytics and reporting stack powering dashboarding on product adoption and COGS.

Required Skills and Experience

Strategy & roadmap

Develops and maintains a multi-release roadmap for Aura Analyst, SingleStore productivity AI Agents, skills and MCP servers, AI/ML functions, query optimization, and observability & alerting, aligned with company strategy and product positioning.

Defines clear problem statements, success criteria, and scope for major initiatives; maintains a prioritized backlog across teams.

Cross-functional leadership & people management

Acts as the product lead across multiple engineering and design teams (engine, cloud, AI platform, SRE, support, DevX).

Directly manages an analytics engineer responsible for building and maintaining reporting on cloud platform operations, product usage, and key business metrics; provides prioritization, feedback, and career coaching.

Provides product direction and mentorship to PMs working in adjacent areas (AI, DevX, analytics).

Ensures initiatives in this portfolio are well understood and sequenced appropriately in planning cycles.

Customer, field, and internal stakeholder engagement

Regularly meets with key customers and design partners to validate problems, designs, and proposed solutions in this portfolio.

Serves as a primary point of contact for the field (Sales, Solutions, CS) on performance, observability, and AI-diagnostics-related topics.

Partners with Support and SRE to translate recurring operational pain (e.g., incidents, hot spots, noisy alerts) into product requirements.

Execution and delivery

Writes product requirements documents and detailed requirements for new features and enhancements; reviews technical design documents and UX designs to ensure alignment with product goals.

Drives end-to-end feature delivery: preview programs, documentation coordination, field enablement, and launch readiness.

Ensures we have clear “definition of done” and acceptance criteria for features in this portfolio.

Metrics and continuous improvement

Defines and tracks key metrics and leading indicators, including (examples, not exhaustive):

Time-to-detect (TTD) and time-to-resolve (TTR) for incidents.

Query performance and resource efficiency metrics (CPU, memory, GPU).

Adoption, engagement, and retention for Aura Analyst and AI/ML functions.

Volume and severity of support tickets related to performance and observability.

Works with analytics and data engineering teams to ensure telemetry, internal views, and dashboards exist to measure these outcomes.

Uses data and qualitative feedback to iterate on UX, feature behavior, and defaults.

Experience quality and cohesion

Ensures experiences across Aura Analyst, AI functions, query insights, and observability feel cohesive, not separate tools, especially for workflows like:

AI-guided querying and analysis

Debugging slow queries or incidents.

Understanding resource consumption and cost.

Operating AI and ML features in production.

Expected Profile and Skills

Deep understanding of distributed databases, query processing, and performance optimization, with comfort reading query plans, indexes, and workload patterns.

Working knowledge of, and experience delivering AI Agents, skills, and/or MCP servers

Strong familiarity with observability and alerting systems and SRE/operations workflows.

Demonstrated ability to work effectively with senior engineering leaders and architects on complex technical decisions and trade-offs.

Strong execution skills: able to drive complex, multi-quarter initiatives across multiple teams while maintaining clarity on goals, ownership, and status.

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present complex technical topics to executives, field teams, and customers in a clear, outcome-oriented way.

Willingness and ability to mentor other PMs and act as a go-to leader for performance, diagnostics, and AI/observability-related product questions.

SingleStore delivers the cloud-native database with the speed and scale to power the world’s data-intensive applications. With a distributed SQL database that introduces simplicity to your data architecture by unifying transactions and analytics, SingleStore empowers digital leaders to deliver exceptional, real-time data experiences to their customers. SingleStore is venture-backed and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Sunnyvale, Raleigh, Seattle, Boston, London, Lisbon, Bangalore, Dublin and Kyiv.

Consistent with our commitment to diversity & inclusion, we value individuals with the ability to work on diverse teams and with a diverse range of people.

To all recruitment agencies: SingleStore does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to SingleStore employees. SingleStore is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.

SingleStore values individuals for their unique skills and experiences, and we’re proud to offer roles in a variety of locations across the United States. Salary is based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location, and is just one part of our total compensation and benefits package. Certain roles are also eligible for additional rewards, including merit increases and annual bonuses.

SingleStore’s total compensation range for this role, if based in Boston, Chicago, New York, Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle, Washington, or Dallas is: $200,000 -  $275,000 USD per year

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